... more to come.
Tuesday, March 25, 2008
Blogs I like
Will be figuring out how we want to link out to our kindred-spirit blogs, but for now, here are some I like.
Path to Freedom and Urban Homestead
The Dervaes family, in Pasadena, has a yard consisting of about 1/5 of an acre, and last year they grew about 3 tons of food. This year they are aiming to grow 5 tons, and they have a lot of other projects going on that we will surely be mentioning here later.
The Ethicurean "Chew the right thing"
The Ethicurean is an excellent group blog about the politics and ethics of food.
... more to come.
... more to come.
Sunday, March 23, 2008
Good Job, World! Solar is the New Cordless.
Solar hen house vents. Solar fence energizers. Solar everything.
It seems that at some point in the past few years we've reached a point where solar isn't an "alternative" power source, it's just the easiest way to do something. Why would I, for example, want to deal with a battery charger to keep my electric fence charged? Why would I want to run wiring to the roof of the hen house or greenhouse to power the ventilation? I don't. I'm a lazy man. It makes me wonder at what point it's going to be cheaper and easier to wire houses for solar and wind instead of dealing with hooking them to the grid. It wasn't long ago that the cool kids were wiring their houses with Cat-5 ethernet for their home networks. Then wifi became ubiquitous and that's just a mess of useless cable now.
In other news, we finally got real growlights installed for the seedlings. I ordered them over the internet. I'm hoping that the cheerful vegetables clearly visible from the outside of the house will at least give pause to the paramilitary DEA agents as they conduct a no-knock raid on my home in anticipation of finding a stray, growlight-enable mary-g-wanna plant.
On a related note, craft distilling is a lot closer to legal in Washington state. There is a lot of tremendously good work being done around food and small farming by Washington regulatory agencies.
It seems that at some point in the past few years we've reached a point where solar isn't an "alternative" power source, it's just the easiest way to do something. Why would I, for example, want to deal with a battery charger to keep my electric fence charged? Why would I want to run wiring to the roof of the hen house or greenhouse to power the ventilation? I don't. I'm a lazy man. It makes me wonder at what point it's going to be cheaper and easier to wire houses for solar and wind instead of dealing with hooking them to the grid. It wasn't long ago that the cool kids were wiring their houses with Cat-5 ethernet for their home networks. Then wifi became ubiquitous and that's just a mess of useless cable now.
In other news, we finally got real growlights installed for the seedlings. I ordered them over the internet. I'm hoping that the cheerful vegetables clearly visible from the outside of the house will at least give pause to the paramilitary DEA agents as they conduct a no-knock raid on my home in anticipation of finding a stray, growlight-enable mary-g-wanna plant.
On a related note, craft distilling is a lot closer to legal in Washington state. There is a lot of tremendously good work being done around food and small farming by Washington regulatory agencies.
Sunday, March 16, 2008
Planting the First!
Did our first planting last weekend. We put in 20' of peas under the trellis. 10' of Sugar Snap peas and 10' of Oregon Trail. We till a yard-and-a-half of Whitney Farms compost and a gallon or so of complete organic fertilizer (a la Steve Solomon) into the soil. It's been raining and sunny off and on so our lack of irrigation system hasn't been a problem. We'll need to get on that sooner rather than later.
It's been a week and nothing has popped out of the ground yet. We've got a week for germination to take place so I'm not worried yet.
On the upside, chicks are three weeks old as of last Friday. They are no longer little fuzz balls and are starting to look like actual chickens. Gangly, half-feathered, awkward teenaged chickens, but chickens nonetheless. Lauren also started 102 plants in ourgreenhouse mudroom. She gets to blog that one though.
It's been a week and nothing has popped out of the ground yet. We've got a week for germination to take place so I'm not worried yet.
On the upside, chicks are three weeks old as of last Friday. They are no longer little fuzz balls and are starting to look like actual chickens. Gangly, half-feathered, awkward teenaged chickens, but chickens nonetheless. Lauren also started 102 plants in our
Tuesday, March 11, 2008
"But opponents contend the program sets a bad example by exposing children to alcohol consumption."
Monday, March 10, 2008
On figures of speech.
(It's the first post to a new blog. Of course it sucks. It breaks the ice like an ice fisherman who tries to stretch the season too long.)
There are a lot of figures of speech that, when living on a farm, turn out to be more literal than not. Cases in point:
1) Keep the home fires burning.
2) Tough row to hoe.
3) Cocky.
4) Bitchy. (This is not technically farm-related, I learned it from Lauren's dog.)
5) Too many irons in the fire. (Again, not necessarily farm-related, but I'm reasonably certain my landlord and neighbors would have frowned upon a forge, propane or no, in my backyard.)
There are a lot of figures of speech that, when living on a farm, turn out to be more literal than not. Cases in point:
1) Keep the home fires burning.
2) Tough row to hoe.
3) Cocky.
4) Bitchy. (This is not technically farm-related, I learned it from Lauren's dog.)
5) Too many irons in the fire. (Again, not necessarily farm-related, but I'm reasonably certain my landlord and neighbors would have frowned upon a forge, propane or no, in my backyard.)
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